Thousands mourn Russian reporter

Western ambassadors joined thousands of mourners carrying candles and flowers at the funeral yesterday of murdered Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya.

Hours after Ms Politkovskaya was buried Russian President Vladimir Putin, on a visit to Germany, called the murder heinous but played down her influence on domestic politics. The murder in central Moscow on Saturday of Ms Politkovskaya - who reported human rights abuses in Chechnya and described Mr Putin as a cynical liar - shocked the West and the diplomats' presence at the funeral was a clear show of solidarity with the mourners.

"She was a unique woman in today's Russia, which has only a small bunch of honest people in politics and journalism," said Nikolai Smirnov, a 26-year-old architect from St Petersburg who had travelled to Moscow for the funeral.

"This is the end of an era for Russian journalism and I don't know what will happen to it now that she is dead."

Most of the mourners carried flowers and candles as they silently filed for hours through the angular Soviet-era stone hall where Ms Politkovskaya's body lay in an open casket - the vast majority were over 40 years old.

"They (young Russians) don't understand that she defended the rights of everybody," said an older lady who would only give her name as Raya said. Ms Politkovskaya worked for the liberal Novaya Gazeta newspaper which is published twice a week and has a readership of around 170,000 - mainly intellectuals - in a country with a population of 142 million.

At a joint news conference after a meeting in Dresden with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Mr Putin brushed off a question about Ms Politkovskaya's murder by describing her as irrelevant to Russian domestic politics.

"The extent of her influence on the public life of the country was insignificant," he said, after he had described the murder as unacceptable.

Ms Politkovskaya, 48, was best known in the West for reporting Russian human rights abuses in its war against Chechen separatists and her book Putin's Russia.